Patrolling the Commons: Peacekeeping and Conflict in a Climate-Changed World

• In Event: Peacekeeping: New Challenges & Perspectives

Abstract

Climate change poses an existential threat to the human well-being around the world. This is especially true for populations residing in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Nations emerging from or actively experiencing violent conflict make up one-third of the world’s most climate-sensitive countries and – because violent conflict frequently erodes the economic, political, and social institutions required for effective governance – one-half of the countries least prepared to engage in climate adaptation. Recent academic research has documented the effects of climate change on peace and development cross-nationally, as has emerging anecdotal evidence from the African Sahel, East Africa, and the Middle East. For example, recent climate change-driven flooding in South Sudan has inhibited humanitarians’ access to millions of displaced persons and risks exacerbating violence related to land-use conflicts along transhumance routes. Despite the focus of much scholarly debate on the security-related effects of climate change (see Barnett and Adger (2007), Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel (2015) and Koubi (2019), and Busby (2022) for extensive reviews), concrete strategies to mitigate the destabilizing potential of climate change in fragile settings remain elusive. Although such strategies are urgently needed, they are difficult to conceptualize, measure, and evaluate systematically. Patrolling the Commons: Peacekeeping and Conflict in a Climate-Changed World offers a new analytical framework, novel data from multiple fragile settings, and a multi-method research design to investigate the role of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations, an oft-proposed tool for mitigating climate-driven conflict (Busby, Smith, and Krishnan 2014, Mach et al. 2019).

Authors

• William G. Nomikos, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Patrick Hunnicutt, Chapman University